You remember the movie. The one where Kevin Costner builds a baseball diamond in a field, having heard an ethereal voice in his head, thrumming away with the command: "If you build it, he will come."

In fact, the Treasury's aiming to go one better in its attempt to drum up support from our pension funds to invest in Britain's creaking infrastructure. It wants them to show up before anyone's even started building the damn thing. You can't knock its Autumn Statement ambition.

Sure, as the Government flounders around for a growth hormone, it's rightly identified that building such things as new schools, hospitals and toll-roads fits the bill nicely, creating socially useful jobs in the process. It's also spotted that pension funds – sitting on more than £1 trillion of assets – have the readies to contribute to a planned £250bn infrastructure spend.

Not only that. The steady returns from infrastructure projects marry up with the funds' long-term pension liabilities.

It sounds great on paper. But the practical's much trickier. First, a bit of perspective. These are the same pension funds that have routinely sold Britain's existing infrastructure to the highest – usually foreign – bidder. Our power stations? Gone to France's EDF and Germany's RWE. Our ports? To Dubai and a bidder led by Goldman Sachs' infrastructure fund. Heathrow airport? Sold to a Spanish construction company.

When the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, costing £5.7bn to build, was sold a year ago for a knockdown £2.1bn, did UK pension funds stump up? No, they were outbid by their Canadian cousins.

So, ask yourself this: if pension funds don't want to own infrastructure that's right in front of them, with an existing revenue stream, why would they want to invest in a green field?

New projects have planning, construction and revenue risks. The sort that saw the Jubilee Line Extension pull in two years late and £1.5bn over budget. And Eurotunnel wipe out its backers, first with construction cost over-runs and then with traffic volumes far below forecasts. Indeed, few pension fund credit committees, not least those at local authorities, would even sanction investments in such start-up projects.

Well, not without some sort of Government guarantee, anyway. Mention the G-word around the Treasury and two points are quickly made. First, that pension funds already take on some such risks via their exposure to specialised infrastructure funds – though total infrastructure investment only accounts for 2pc of portfolios. And, second, that they've just signed up to memorandums of understanding promising more.

An MoU, though, is not a deal. The test for the Treasury is to turn fine words of support into hard cash for greenfield projects. Whatever the Treasury may claim, few reckon this can be done without some sort of taxpayer guarantee on costs or revenues. Indeed, the bigger the risk, the bigger the guarantee required.

How you do it would vary by project. Take a £100m prison, say, funded by £15m equity and £85m debt – the sort of leverage that would immediately deter pension funds, whatever the other risks. If during the construction phase, however, the Government took first loss on the top £20m of senior debt, pension funds might fancy it.

How to provide such guarantees while keeping the resultant contingent liabilities off the national debt is one consideration. Another is how to pool the allocation of small pension funds with little infrastructure experience into a private body with the expertise to make meaningful investments. The answer taking shape is the new Pension Investment Platform, possibly headed by Pensions Corporation founder Edmund Truell. But there's plenty of detail yet to thrash out.

In the film, no sooner does Costner build his baseball pitch than up pops the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson. While that may work in the movies, which particular field of dreams has pension funds backing greenfield investment without any Governmetn guarantee?

Unlike Joe, they have no intention of losing their shoes – let alone their shirts.

Activists hunt ex-Thomas Cook boss' bonus

No wonder corporate governance activists are gunning for Manny Fontenla-Novoa, the ex-Thomas Cook chief executive, ousted in August after three profits warnings.

He pocketed a £5m bonus three years ago, to the chagrin of institutional investors, for pulling off a £3.4bn holiday companies' merger and overseeing their integration. Now the group's worth £190m – and that's after Friday's emergency £100m bail-out.

With investors calling for "clawback" provisions over pay, Fontenla-Novoa is under pressure to hand back his bonus. At the time, he was contractually entitled to it, so that looks unlikely. But it would be a decent gesture to return his £1.1m pay-off.